Monday, June 18, 2018

Dan Moldea on RFK, Jr.

[ BK: In this Boston Globe response to RFK, Jr.'s interview in the Washington Post - Dan Moldea is interviewed extensively, and says RFK, Jr. has been "misled" by the "conspiracy crowd," when in fact, Modea himself wrote a book blaming the Mafia for the murder of President Kennedy. In this article, Nik DeCosta-Klipa should have fully disclosed the fact that Dan Moldea is a close personal friend of Eugene Thane Cesar, the security guard hired the day before who was in the pantry, and who liked about owning a 22 revolver, similar to Siran's, and that Moldea is the godfather to Cesar's son, which does not make Moldea an objective and honest observer. ][BK: In addition, Boston Globe reporter Brian Bender, who has reported accurately on the release of the JFK assassination records, has said that "RFK,Jr.'s name carries no weight," when in fact it is Dan Moldea's name that carries no weight and RFK, Jr. is well recognized and respected as an environmental attorney.]

BOSTON GLOBE - May 31, 2018 Bobby
Kennedy’s son thinks he was killed by a second shooter. Is there anything to
it?

Or has
RFK Jr. "launched a whole new generation of conspiracy nuts" 50 years
later.

Conspiracies
surrounding President John F. Kennedy’s death may be most widely circulated. However, one theory questioning our
understanding of Robert F. Kennedy’s murder in 1968 has arguably gained more
recent traction, including from those closest to the assassination and even one
immediate member of Kennedy’s family.

“My
father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country,” Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. recently told The Washington Post. “I think it would
have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”

According
to the Post, Kennedy’s second oldest son now believes, after months of
research, that his father was killed by a second gunman.

RFK Jr.
even visited Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of shooting and killing his
father, because he was “curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the
evidence.” He isn’t the only one. But others who’ve deeply investigated the
case say the second-shooter explanation is a shallow theory that irresponsibly
lets Sirhan off the hook.

“If you
believe the LAPD reports about this case, there is no way that Sirhan did it
and did it alone,” Dan Moldea, an investigative journalist and author of The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy, told Boston.com.

“But if
you assume that the LAPD f—ed up — not crimes of commission, but crimes of
omission,” Moldea says the theory begins to unravel.

“What
Bobby Kennedy Jr. has done, he’s launched a whole new generation of conspiracy
nuts who are going to believe that Sirhan didn’t do it and that somebody else
did,” he said.

Here’s
what we know happened

Kennedy
was assassinated almost exactly 50 years ago, on June 5, 1968, at
the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Sen.
Robert F. Kennedy awaits medical assistance as he lies on the floor of the
Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments after he was shot.

The
42-year-old Brookline native had just finished speaking to supporters in the
hotel ballroom after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary.
After finishing his address, Kennedy was walking through the hotel kitchen
pantry amid a crowd of people when Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant,
began shooting his .22-caliber revolver.

Kennedy,
who was hit three times, and five others were shot. However, the ascendant
candidate was the only one for whom the gunshot wounds would prove fatal. He
died the following day at a nearby hospital.

Sirhan
was almost immediately tackled at the scene by witnesses and arrested on
several charges, including murder. Police found an article in his pocket
critical of Kennedy’s support for Israel, which appeared to be his motive. A Christian Palestinian, Sirhan
was forced to flee Jerusalem with his family in 1948, after their home was
seized by Jewish insurgents. A notebook was also found in Sirhan’s apartment
with an entry, just two weeks earlier, asserting that Kennedy “must” soon be
assassinated.

Sirhan
has long maintained that he has no recollection of the assassination, though he
did go to a shooting range earlier in the day of the assassination. During his
trial, he actually admitted to the assassination, but later recanted and now
says the confession was part of his defense lawyer’s strategy to spare him from
the death penalty, rather than argue his innocence.

“I went
along with him because he had my life in his hands,” Sirhan told Moldea in 1993.
“I was duped into believing that he had my best interests in mind. It was a
futile defense. ”

Sirhan
was convicted by a jury and sentenced to death. However, his sentence was
commuted to life in prison in 1972 when California abolished the death penalty.

“Everyone
agrees Sirhan was a gunman, with the dispute being whether he was the
only one,” Larry Tye, an RFK biographer, told Boston.com in an email.

Why do
people think there could have been a second gunman?

Skeptics
of the accepted narrative of what happened in the Ambassador Hotel kitchen
pantry center around the ballistic evidence.

First,
Kennedy was shot from behind at point-blank range, according to the autopsy report. The fatal shot entered
behind his right ear, the report said. But witnesses say that Sirhan approached
from the front, on Kennedy’s right, and that his gun never got closer than
about a foot-and-a-half away.

Second,
according to the official reports, eight total shots were fired. Kennedy was
hit three times and five others were also shot. After all, Sirhan’s .22-caliber
revolver carried a maximum of just eight bullets. And yet, there’s evidence
that suggests more than eight shots were fired.

According
to the FBI’s crime scene report, there were four bullet holes in the wall and
door frame in the direction Sirhan was shooting. Photos of the door frame,
which were reportedly destroyed after the trial, showed each of the holes
circled by Los Angeles police.

Additionally, a
low-quality audiotape of the shooting revealed up to 13 shots,
according to electrical engineer Philip Van Praag.

However,
there’s disagreement among the the audio analysts who have
studied the tape. A group of five experts who studied the tape after Van
Praag’s claim could find no more than eight shot signatures. As CNN reported in 2012, several witnesses said they heard between
five and 12 shots.

And
lastly, in 1975, a Los Angeles court appointed a firearms panel to re-fire
Sirhan’s gun and match the bullets to the three that hit Kennedy. Even though
the original investigation (which was highly criticized for its handling of the
evidence) seven years earlier said the bullets found had matched Sirhan’s
.22-caliber revolver, the reinvestigation was unable to do the same.

So what
are the holes in this theory?

Moldea —
who interviewed Sirhan three times, talked to more than 100 police officers
involved in the investigation, and scoured countless pages of official reports
for his 1995 book — also used to believe in the second-shooter theory. He even
sold his book proposal on that premise.

“I was
wrong,” he said in a recent interview.

According
to Moldea, all the evidence for a second shooter can be explained away by
shoddy police work and conspiratorial thinking.

On the
first point, Moldea says everyone agrees with the autopsy report’s conclusion
that Kennedy was shot at close range and from behind. But just because Sirhan
approaches him from the front doesn’t mean there was a second shooter.

“As he’s
attacking Kennedy, he’s lunging and going, ‘Kennedy, you son of a bitch,'” said
Moldea, citing eyewitness accounts of the shooting. Moldea says Kennedy’s
natural reaction would have been to turn away from Sirhan, which would explain
the angle of his gunshot wounds.

“The
conspiracy people will have you believe that Kennedy is standing there, putting
his chest out,” he said. “If you see someone running at you, shouting ‘You son
of a bitch,’ he’s got a gun in his hand, what are you going to do? You’re going
to turn defensively.”

In his
reconstruction, Moldea says Paul Schrade, a labor activist who was walking on
Kennedy’s left, was hit with the first bullet and collapsed into the senator,
incidentally pushing him back toward Sirhan, who was then able to reach him at
point-blank range.

But what
about the four bullet holes in the wall and door frame? Moldea says it doesn’t
take a ballistics expert to know the suggestion of additional bullets was
problematic.

“An
eight-shot revolver can’t fire more than eight bullets,” he said. “That I know.
Now you got the FBI identifying four extra bullets in the walls and door frame
in Sirhan’s line of fire. That’s a problem.”

In the
process of researching his book, Moldea said he was able to identify the Los
Angeles officer who marked the bullet holes, Walter Tew, who was a deputy
patrolman with no expertise in firearms identification.

Furthermore,
Moldea found a report in the state archives from Alfred Greiner, the FBI
agent who included the holes in the bureau’s report, that said a hotel clerk
had given him a tour of the pantry. According to Greiner, it was the clerk who
originally identified the bullet holes.

“This is
a hotel clerk, who I’m sure knows how to take a great reservation, but know
absolutely nothing about bullet holes,” Moldea said.

Moldea
says the holes were likely the result of any number the kitchen’s carts banging
into the wall and said the pantry was “full of holes” when he visited the
hotel years later. DeWayne Wolfer, the original lead investigator of the
shooting, has
also said the holes weren’t caused by bullets and that no extra
bullets were ever found.

And as
for the bullets not matching Sirhan’s gun when it was re-fired in 1975, Moldea
says he visited the crime lab to ask why they couldn’t replicate what they had
done several years later. Moldea said employees at the lab told him that they
had taken Sirhan’s gun following the 1969 trial and, figuring the case was
over, shot it hundreds of times for fun.

“The
problem is that when you shoot a gun, the barrel changes,” he said. “The lands
and grooves change. And when you fire the gun a hundred times, you change the
barrel of the gun. Therefore, a match with bullets that were fired a hundred
shots earlier, you’re not going to be able to make a match.”

Who
would the second gunman have been?

The man
conspiracy theorists most commonly point to is Thane Eugene Cesar. Cesar
was a security guard who hated the Kennedys and supported George Wallace, the
former Alabama governor and segregationist presidential candidate in 1968.

Cesar
was also walking with Kennedy when the shooting occurred and was carrying
a .38-caliber revolver, which he says he never fired. However, he also owned a
.22-caliber similar to Sirhan’s gun, which he initially told police he sold
before the assassination, but had actually, it was later found, sold three
months after the shooting. There’s no evidence he had the gun with him
when the shooting took place.

Moldea,
who at the time was pursuing the second-shooter theory, confronted Cesar about
the inconsistencies in his story in 1987. Cesar categorically denied shooting
his gun, no less the fatal bullet.

“I got
caught in a situation I can’t get out of,” he told Moldea.
“But no matter what anybody says or any report they come up with, I know I
didn’t do it. The police department knows I didn’t do it. There’re just a few
people out there who want to make something out of something that isn’t
there—even though I know that some of the evidence makes me look bad.”

Cesar
later even agreed to be polygraphed by a professional expert and “passed with
flying colors.”

So why
has this theory resurfaced?

Sirhan,
who continues to serve his life sentence in a San Diego prison, has repeatedly
been denied parole, most recently in 2016. The convicted murderer and his
lawyers have embraced other assassination conspiracy theories — from the
mysterious “girl in the polka-dot dress” to a supposed mind control plot — as they try to argue his
case. According to the Post, Sirhan’s defense team is launching “a
long-shot bid” to get a hearing with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Schrade,
the labor activist who was shot during the assassination, also now
believes there was a second shooter, after long having been critical of law
enforcement’s handling of the case, which both sides agree was sloppy.

“Yes,
[Sirhan] shot four other people and aimed at Kennedy,” the 93-year-old told
the Post. “The important thing is he did not shoot Robert Kennedy. Why
didn’t they go after the second gunman?

They knew about him right away. They
didn’t want to know who it was. They wanted a quickie.”

Moldea
says the second-shooter theory persists because authoritatively making the case
that Sirhan was the sole shooter isn’t a clean and easy task. The 68-year-old
journalist says he talked to RFK Jr. earlier in the year after he visited
Sirhan and tried to explain that Sirhan’s team was promoting the theory to
increase the odds he might get released from prison.

“I would
not want to take the blame for this crime as long as there is exculpatory
evidence that I didn’t do the crime,” Sirhan admitted to Moldea in 1993.

Moldea
said he is “livid” with how the Post treated the recent story and
imagines Sirhan is “in his jail cell right now spiking the
football.” Quoting from his book, he reiterated his point that nearly
every murder can be made to look like a conspiracy if “occasional official
mistakes and incompetence” are not taken into account.

“I think
[RFK Jr.] has been misled, conned, and corrupted by the conspiracy crowd to
believe this garbage that the man that murdered his father is innocent,” Moldea
said.